SSD drive shipments have tripled over the last year

GLOBAL SHIPMENTS of solid state disk (SSD) drives have more than tripled over the past year, a market tracker report from analytics firm IHS has revealed, thanks to their growing adoption within ultrathin PCs, ultrabooks and tablet devices.

IHS said that this is up more than threefold from the 1.9 million units shipped worldwide to ultrathin and ultrabook PCs during the same three month period in 2012, amounting to four million more shipments.

SSDs also made an impact in the tablet sector IHS said, with shipments hitting 1.6 million units, also tripling the figures from the same period last year where sales were recorded at just 542,000 units.

"SSD shipments were up in virtually every segment where the electronic disks with no moving mechanical parts are used," IHS said.

"SSD deployment rose not only in the enterprise segment governing business, but also staged strong gains in the various non-enterprise fields covering desktop PCs, notebook PCs and the industrial market for applications such as aerospace, automotive and medical electronics."

Across all market segments, SSD shipments amounted to 11.5 million units in the first quarter of this year, up 92 percent from the six million a year ago.

IHS said its data of the total shipments covers standalone SSDs as well as the NAND flash components used together with hard disk drives to form cache SSDs or hybrid drives.

Although hard disk drive (HDD) shipments slumped in the consumer market due to the rising use of SSD drives, they showed strong sales in the enterprise market this quarter, where shipments amounted to 16 million units worldwide, up from 14.9 million in the first quarter of 2012.

IHS claimed that this demand for HDDs is expected to continue growing because of the "exploding use of data among consumers, especially in music, video and social networking".

"Consumers' needs, in turn, will necessitate cost-effective storage solutions on the part of data centers and cloud servers that store and serve up the data," IHS said.

"HDDs are still considerably less expensive than solid-state drives, so their use remains assured despite uneven or dwindling market results at times." µ